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IPIP Community Blog

August 2008
Michael Gale
2

We are excited about speaking with you all this week. Our business interviews tens of thousands of IT professionals around the world every year to understand the hot trends in how they are using information from suppliers and media companies, online, offline in social groups, analyst houses and at events. We hope to show you some interesting trends from the last seven years that might help you spend your time even more productively, as well as encouraging you to look around the world for some hot trends we could be using.

 

It always amazes us that in a world of high technology penetration IT professionals still turn on a frequent basis to the US content centers. In the booming worlds of Brazil, India, Russia and China we will soon see a world dominated by three centers, the Americas, Western Europe and the combination of China and India.

 

 

Given the lack of communications legacy in the latter markets it is interesting to see if there are tricks they have up their sleeves in garnering information that are different to the skills and experiences we have accumulated over so many years. Time is one of most precious commodities so can we get some of it back like our colleagues in the new world?

 

 

For IT professionals working in leading edge type organizations in China the hot sources of information for servers are very, very mixed: Information from analysts, technology-based publications (print and online), and what is most remarkable in a market with some "government control" of online access, IT forums/ blogs beats online search.

 

 

In the US the same types of targets are frankly a touch more traditional: trade shows and technology publications rule, but nowhere in the top eight choices will you find online search or IT forums/blogs. In India the same targets buying servers use technology print online versions but they love getting information from IT forums/blogs, TV/radio, direct sales contact, industry conferences, direct email and email newsletters.

 

 

There are big, big differences comparing the old world to the new world. In the west we can see a more traditional view in play. Sure online is there and it is in the mix everywhere, but in the legacy-free new world the mixes of online are even richer. If there is anything we can learn from our new world colleagues it is that online has a key role, but they have not abandoned more traditional choices either. We could get even more time back if we sat back and made some changes to our information consumption patterns. The new world shows us the way forward. We see a thirst for peer interactions and online search, eclectic mixes like in India and China (where online freedom is limited).

2 Comments Permalink
David Buchholz
4

As I sit back and think of some of the newer technologies we have looked at recently, I find myself wondering if IT is in the never ending cycle of re-inventing the wheel. What I mean by this is sometimes it seems as if we continue to try and re-engineer everything to make it fit our environment or how we think it should work. When viewing newer technologies, usage models and trying to pass data off to other groups the phrases I think I hear the most are, “That will never work in our environment,” or “If we can get them to change this, this and this, we may be able to use it here” or my favorite, “This will never be secure enough for us to use it as it exists”. While these may be valid assessments against the way we do things today, the big question is: should we be pushing ourselves to look for new ways of doing things? Five years ago, employees preferred to use their machines and software loads supplied by IT because they were more powerful or feature rich than anything they had at home. But in today’s society, people have higher end machines at home than IT supplies them. They also use newer technologies that are usually off limits or not supported by IT. Think of some of the tools we use today, such as this blog or even instant messaging. These technologies exist in our corporate environment because we saw people using them at home and brought them into our corporate environment. It wasn’t something that IT created and people took home to use. So with so many of these newer technologies out there, should we keep pushing to make them adapt to our IT world, or should we start pushing IT to start adapting to new models. We take umbrella approaches to everything today. Total security of the platform, instead of trying to reduce the footprint we have to manage. We look for solutions that will cover the majority of the users, versus what may be right for smaller enclaves. We place several management clients on the platform to perform numerous tasks instead of using native components or reducing some of the redundant requirements we have. Moving forward, the next generation of workers will expect businesses to offer familiar technology and won’t accept tradition as an excuse. IT shops need to provide workers with “cool” ways to work. If they don’t, they risk becoming obsolete.

4 Comments Permalink Tags: innovation, planning, generation, virtualization, alternate_compute_models, performance
Sue Anne Bravo
0

Businesses are experiencing an unprecedented amount of growth in data - with stored data doubling every 18 months. This creates a unique set of challenges for Small and Medium sized Businesses (SMBs). SMBs are facing a constantly increasing need for additional storage, higher performance and increased reliability, all on a limited budget.

 

The Intel(r) Business Exchange team is working with Open-E, a storage software company that offers a unified storage management solution that provides NAS (file) and iSCSI (block), Fibre Channel and InfiniBand in a single operating system. Through this work we have been talking to their marketing manager, Deborah Jones, about the issues facing SMBs and I thought it would be interesting to ask Deborah to share her thoughts on the SMB's main storage issues and how they should address those issues.

 

-

Typically, SMBs face three key issues in relation to storage:

 

  • Escalating costs. The IT budgets for the SMB cannot keep up with the demand for storage -historically the only solutions available were built for the Enterprise with all of the associated cost and complexity.

  • A high risk of data loss. SMBs are facing a possible loss to their business because of limited backup and restore capabilities and no disaster recovery plan in the event of a natural disaster or human error. If data is lost the SMB may lose significant revenue, experience legal repercussions or possibly go out of business.

  • Unmanaged growth. The proliferation of Direct Attached Storage or DAS has driven up cost of managing data and created islands of storage. Currently available networked and SAN storage solutions were built for the Enterprise and are costly and difficult to manage.

 

There are many cost advantages to centralized, consolidated storage that SMBs are missing out on. However, the overriding concern is that current Enterprise solutions are too expensive and complex for the SMB. But now there are solutions available that were purpose built for the SMB, that provide all of the Enterprise features and functionality without the associated costs.

 

There are some key elements that SMBs need to consider when purchasing a centralized storage solution:

 

 

  • Does the solution provide both file and block storage? Look at solutions that provide both Networked Attached Storage (NAS) for sharing data and iSCSI for consolidating storage.

  • Will it have intergraded, advanced features? The system must provide these critical capabilities and advanced functionalities: snapshot copy for back up, automatic failover for data availability, remote replication for disaster recovery and WORM for archiving and compliance.

  • How difficult is the system to configure and manage? Ease of management is important as most SMBs don't have the expertise or time needed to configure, manage and support a storage system. Look for an easy-to-use, GUI based system that incorporates a web based interface for all advanced functions.

 

Additionally, the SMB should look beyond the initial costs of the system and consider the expense of software licensing, software upgrades, service, maintenance and other hidden costs that can occur annually.

 

As IT budgets are shrinking and the costs of managing data escalating, the challenge to the SMB is to find a reliable, full featured, low cost storage solution.

 

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In upcoming blogs I hope to be able to share thoughts and best practices from experts in various areas of interest. Please send on any requests for topics and/or products you might be interested in.

0 Comments Permalink Tags: storage, smb, business, open-e, it_budget, data
Enrique Castro-Leon
0

In a previous post, Virtual Service Oriented Grids: Scalable Enterprise Computing, I mentioned how the convergence of three old technologies is facilitating large scale computing in the enterprise. It is no coincidence that there are historical drivers for this transformation. In the IT world in the mid to late 1990s, you may recall that this was the era of eCommerce where most business activities under the sun became "Webified" and even the craziest ideas became capitalized. It as a boom which led to the inevitable bust. Some say it was triggered because work on the Millennium Bug stopped once the issue was "solved". No matter the reason, the momentum was unsustainable.

 

There was a lot of soul searching after the bust. Only a few survivors remain today, the most remarkable examples being Amazon.com, Google, Ebay and Yahoo. If there is one lesson coming from this period is that an essential element for sustainability is that Information Technology and Business need to be aligned.

 

 

The increasing adoption of Service Oriented Architectures or SOA represents the increasing recognition by IT organizations of the need for business and technology alignment. In fact, under SOA there is no difference between the two. The unit of delivery for SOA is a service, which is usually defined in business terms. In other words, SOA represents the up-leveling if IT, empowering IT organizations to meet the business needs of the community it serves. This up-leveling creates a gap, because for IT, eventually business requirements need to be translated into technology based solutions.

 

 

Our research indicates that this gap is being fulfilled by the resurgence of two very old technologies, namely virtualization and grid computing. To begin with, SOA allowed the de-coupling of data from applications through the magic of XML.

 

 

A lot of work that used to be done by application developers and integrators now gets done by computers. When most data centers run at 5 to 10 percent utilization, growing and deploying more data centers is not a good solution. Virtualization technology came very handy to address this situation, allowing the de-coupling of applications from the platforms in which they run. It acts as the gearbox in a car ensuring efficient transmission of power from the engine to the wheels.

 

 

The net effect of virtualization is that it allows utilization factors to go up in the 60 to 70%. The technique has been applied to mainframes for decades. Deploying virtualization to tens of thousands of servers has not been easy.

 

 

Finally, grid technology has allowed very fast, on the fly resource management, where resources are allocated not when a physical server is provisioned, but for each instance that a program is run.

 

 

Virtual service oriented grids represents the maturation of the three underlying technologies. The coming of age for a technology takes place whenever business, process and standardization become overriding considerations. Virtual service oriented grids rely heavily on standardization to attain interoperability, it is guided by governance at the corporate level, and are very much policy based and SLA driven. The underlying technologies become black boxes, their behavior defined by service level agreements (SLAs).

 

 

For any application, the management of the components is centralized, but the components ("servicelets") are assumed to be distributed. The servicelets are fungible and can be integrated in real time by design to allow applications to scale up and down, to be assembled and torn down as business conditions dictate.

 

 

In the next few entries we will go through a few examples. The subject is rich enough for a book, which indeed we have written. The book is scheduled for publication in September 2008 through Intel Press. Here is the book preface as a preview: New Book Excerpt from Intel Press: The Business Value of Service Oriented Grids.

 

 

0 Comments Permalink Tags: business_value, interconnected_computer, virtual_service_oriented_grids, soa, grids, enterprise_computing, smb, manageability, composite_applications, compound_applications
jackbe123
0

When analysts talk, people listen. I am proud to say that JackBe is no exception. For example, we recently heard that a[ recent Forrester survey of 262 US IT decision-makers revealed|http://www.forrester.com/Research/Document/Excerpt/0,7211,46380,00.html] ‘41% have never heard of mashups’. Based on this, Larry Dignan at ZDNet recommended companies like JackBe ‘start talking to CIOs and technology decision makers’. To this marketer’s ears, that's all the marching orders I need.

 

Coincidentally, JackBe has had the opportunity to perform a simple survey of our own in the past few months. We asked over 1,200 people some very simple questions about enterprise mashups. The responses are striking, particularly in light of Forrester’s survey.

 

The first question was fundamentally simple: ‘Are you implementing or planning to implement an enterprise mashup solution?’. And the overall response was encouraging:

 

  • Yes (49%)

  • No (51%)

 

And of the 49% that replied ‘Yes’, over 50% of them are going about their implementation in the next 12 months.

 

The second question has the potential to be even more instructive: ‘Could you briefly describe the business problem Enterprise Mashups will address for you?’. We received hundreds of distinct answers to this query (we published a few in the distant past). Here’s are some notable replies. (Note: we tried not to wordsmith these responses, so you can picture these real-world examples as they are imagined by their owners.)

 

For vertical/industry use...

 

Manufacturing

 

1. Consolidate a large volume of data created by R&D scientists and a wafer fabricator to understand metrics that can improve R&D tool utilization and time-to-market.

2. System performance monitoring and customer service support for electronic products.

 

Government

 

1. Develop desktop and mobile real-time collaborative situational awareness applications for DOD, Public Safety, and Emergency Management.

2. Tie together an ESRI GIS system and a 311 citizen call center CRM app for flexible graphical reporting to county managers.

 

Education

 

1. Enable students to combine disparate information resources into digital learning objects

2. Aid upper management and executive decisions by providing better financial and service usage information about the many departments within Campus Life.

 

For horizontal/functional use...

 

Support/Enhance Existing Information Technology

 

1. SOA/BPM extended to power users.

2. Various operational data sources and BI reporting solutions with high-cost interfaces and integration points for data consolidation.

3. Portal replacement.

4. Address limitations in existing IT systems to address strategic and operational business pain points emerging due to inefficient data work flow between applications.

5. Address supply chain management and demand forecasting challenges resulting from upstream data definition and propagation issues.

6. Combining Portal and Data Warehouse Reporting elements.

7. 10 Year old legacy backends, not able to interface to modern supplier organizations.

 

Financial/Executive Information/Analysis

 

1. Dynamically merge top line data from key organizational functions like billing information, new business requests information, staff timesheets, accounting bottom lines, etc, in short/small packets to make constant decisions.

2. Treasury Risk Management.

3. Tax code integration.

 

Web 2.0-Style Employee Enablement

 

1. Allowing business people to create their own set of information and services based on well managed services to solve their individual problems.

2. Knowledge Management and Actionable decision dashboards.

 

I think JackBe’s survey results shows that there is a cadre of IT decision-makers that are well past the ‘never heard of mashups’ stage. I propose that this group is also past the subsequent ‘what can it do for me’ stage, and well into the ‘how do I get it done’ stage.

 

I expect the difference between Forrester’s survey results and JackBe’s survey results is simply a matter of the survey audience. JackBe surveyed folks through our website, so our surveyees have likely already gotten past the ‘what’s a mashup?’ question. Heck, that’s what most of our website is all about!

 

In spite of these facts, however, there are still many out there (including some of you reading this blog, perhaps) that might not get the gist of an enterprise mashup. So, if you are in that 41% ‘never heard of mashups’ group, I’ve got a few recommendations for you:

 

1. Do some reading. Blogs can help cut through the hype and get to the real value and substance of mashups.

2. Do some playing. When it comes to mashups, the best learning tools are hands-on demonstrations, as they tend to be relatively hype-free.

3. Check out what the experts are saying. There are many. For example, Gartner, Forrester, Hinchcliffe and McKendrick have been very active in their coverage of enterprise mashups in the last year.

4. Get your hands dirty. J[ackBe has a Trial of our Presto Enterprise Mashup solution|http://www.jackbe.com/resources/download.php] and, if you must, so do some of our competitors.

 

As a start, I’d recommend ‘[An Executive Guide to Mashups in the Enterprise|http://www.jackbe.com/resources/whitepapers.php]’ by Dion Hinchcliffe. It’s a good way to get out of that 41%.

0 Comments Permalink Tags: enterprise, mashups, soa, web, 2.0
Enrique Castro-Leon
0

Present day enterprise computing may involve thousands of interconnected computers. Users benefiting from the operation of these machines may not even be aware of the vast scale of this infrastructure; the system just "works". This is computing in the large, the enterprise IT equivalent of the cosmological superclusters.

 

These enterprise computing superclusters exhibit certain patterns and behaviors that can be understood through the integration of three very well established technologies, virtualization, service orientation and grid computing. We call the collective representation of these superclusters "virtual service oriented grids" or VSGs for short.

 

 

If you take this trio of technologies one at a time, they're old news. Research on virtualization goes back to the early 1960s and the same holds true for SOA if we go back to its roots in object oriented programming. Grids were started in the late 80s, but if we take their high performance computing context, they go back to the dawn of electronic computing in the early 1940s.

 

 

Together these three powerful technologies define a new information technology model that will fundamentally change the way we do business. It is not because we'll be able to bring up wonderful new applications to market. That's only the beginning. These technologies allow the development of applications in a federated fashion using service modules that we call "servicelets". The difference is that these federated or composite applications can be built orders of magnitude faster than traditional, single-vendor applications. This new environment will open opportunities for thousands of smaller players worldwide.

 

 

0 Comments Permalink Tags: virtualization, service_orientation, grid_computing, supercluster, interconnected_computer, servicelets, service_modules, composite_applications, federate_applications, soa

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